It's the end of the world as you know it – brought to you by a Gnome Mage with big balls of fire

You can shove your GearScore right up your Gnomehole!

I’ve got a GearScore… It’s somewhere between 1 and 5000. I know it was 4554 a week or so ago.

A friend looked me up while he snowman danced with me, otherwise I would have no idea.

I did some Ulduar

Off tangent for a moment, I’ll bring it back on course I promise.

Back a day or so before appearing on TNB, I did a couple of bosses in Ulduar. We only got Flame Leviathan and XT down, wiped on Razorscale and chucked it in. It was a late night, spur of the moment thing so no wucking furries.

Can you heal Ulduar10 hardmode?

I was in LookingForRaid when I got the whisper. I said I doubted it, but if it was normal I’d be ok.

He asked for GearScore and Achievements and I foolishly said yes.

Foolishly because I passed up 3 other raid offers waiting for their invite.

Foolishly because… Well I’ll get to that…

My issue with GearScore and Achievement Checking.

The person demanding it is covering their butt, not yours. They want to make sure their run is successful, not gaurantee yours.

I guess I’m going down with the sinking ship…

Finally I get an invite and we head to FL. I get told to get away from the chopper, they it’s use is explained in detail like it’s the most important vehicle in the joint… No word on the others.

We got FL down… Thanks largely to me. The others were hardly on the meters… Whatever, I guess people can screw up… Somehow… Don’t know how, but they must be able to.

Maybe they didn’t throw Pyrite… We certainly never shot any down…

Deconstructing!

On to XT, my 1st real opportunity to see what this uber GearScore and Achievement needing raid was like…

After 15 odd minutes of terrible instructions the tank charged in…

STOP, STOP, STOP!

Luckily the one comment he read of mine was to stop.

Everyone had ignored my comments about the adds on either side of the room, but now the tank listened and charged off. The OT nearly ran in the opposite direction, stopping just before body pulling…

Mmm not a good sign.

We engaged XT

We wiped.

Pretty dismally really. Apparently the DPS didn’t want to be troubled with bursting down the bomb bots because the boss was bigger or something…

The Heals just aren’t good enough…

It was the healers fault of course, well not the MT healer cause she managed to keep the tank at 20% the whole time… Mmmm

Healers reassigned. I am no longer solely on the OT (who didn’t take any damage until the non-dps’d bomb bot exploded in his face. I had been raid healing because the 3rd healer would have let everyone die.

So the new healing assignment is well, same as before except now I am officially healing the raid and 75% of the off tank.

They couldn’t tell me which 75%, so I decided I’d look after the top 75% of his health bar… After that it was the other healers problem.

We did much better this time, it was another wipe… but quicker and less painful.

Taking out the raid rubbish

The raid leader steps up and announces that he’s kicking the crap DPS, which draws my attention to Recount.

I was a bit confused… There was no DPS above 2,500 and only two above 2,000. The raid leader wasn’t one of them!

So what was he going to do, kick everyone including himself?

Someone left, or was kicked, and while they looked for another DPS the raid leader said something smart in vent about how disappointed he would be if they didn’t get it this time… My response:

If this fails I will be reasonably pissed… get gear checked and can’t even down 2nd boss…

The response…

Don’t get pissed at us. Get pissed at our stupid 10 year old main tank, who left cuz her sister wanted to play hello kitty

I wonder why?

Sensible Raid member selection

They got their replacement, an apparently awesomely geared and experienced healer…

HEALER?!?!

WTF!

2 tanks,

4 healers, and

4 DPS that can’t crack 2,500 DPS

Squidly the Patient

Now I’m a patient guy, so I stuck around. I just had to see how 4 healers were going to save the raid.

We engaged…

We wiped…

I said Thanks for the invite!

I dropped group…

What a bunch of tossers!

Straight after this fail group I joined a quick Noth job for the weekly raid quest… it was the complete opposite, quick professional lots of DPS.

He’s hardly an idiot. It’s a useful addon. I suppose we could get into a philosophical argument about responsibility for misuse of a product, but it’s not as if he made GS and advertised is as Skill Score.

Agreed.. let’s face it.. in TBC we were asking for DPS… not a whole lot of difference.. in fact that’s what people were asking for at the beginning of WoLK as well.

The tool itself is ok per se.. it’s uses can be questionable.

The one thing I find it more questionable for than weeding out new/undergeared people, it using it to pad out your crappy raid group, without giving indication that you group shouldn’t be allowed out of Naxx10

Belmann hit the nail right on the head. To say GearScore is a fantastic tool for determining if someone do well in a raid is like saying a Sledgehammer is a good tool to put up a finishing nail to hang a picture.

GearScore does just that… looks at iLvl and assigns a value to that. Nothing more and nothing less. It just says, “Hey, this toon has high level gear.” Kinda useless if the person you’re looking at is a week or two old 80 that has run eleventy billion five mans a day to outfit themselves in T9 but has never seen a raid boss outside of the weekly.

What would be awesome is if an addon could give you an in-game report like imba.hu does on their site. It would give you a gear score, warnings (like missing or bad chants/gems/etc), and a quick overview of that toons experience. It would be a MUCH better tool for a raid lead to have over just a number.

Meh… my point is Gearscore is a tool. If the tool is used improperly (like thinking score = skill) it’s not the tools fault. Keep that logic up and next thing you know you’ll be blaming pens for spelling errors.

I use Gearscore, mostly so I know whether or not to talk to any given pug. I’m only at 4500 (I haven’t run any ICC since it came out really, been doing other stuff) but if some guy says he wants 5k gearscore to run H VH, I can know that he’s a idiot and I don’t want to run with him.

Thank you so very much for this post. I’m having a stupid, stupid day at work and to read about the Hello Kitty excuse (which you should TM, by the way) made me laugh – a nice change to smashing my head against my desk in frustration! Kudos!!

@Zymurg: There is an addon called “Elitist Group” on curse that does just that. It is similar to Gearscore, but will also warn of unenchented/ungemmed items or items who does not belong to the players spec.

It is still in beta so there are occasionally wrong alerts, but the author is quick to release new versions if you report any wrong things you see.

I like the ability of wow-heroes & wowhead to point out bad/missing gems & enchants. I don’t care about the numbers… But then, I use itfor myself, not looking at others.

BUT, since the only in-game addon I’ve seen is GS, I’ll use it as a VERY basic metric for:

– am *I* geared enough for a given instance
– is the tank geared enough , or do I need to hold back
– is the healer geared enough, or do I need to be careful
– if I’m in an ICC 5 man, are the other DPS geared enough

As has been mentioned over & over, having the gear doesn’t mean anything about skill, but being TOO low can also mean that you simply can’t handle something, regardless of how skilled you are.

Other than that, my only “care” about GS is that I can mouse over folks doing laps in Dal, and if I see a high scored fellow Ret-Pal, I can review his gear to see if it’s anything I want to get. (an odd note: on my server, I’ve only run across a couple geared Rets. We seem rather rare)

[…] love post, I could find something fantastic to link to at Gnomer’s Place – but I found this story of a difficult Ulduar run absolutely hilarious. Okay, I probably wouldn’t if I’d been there but still… […]

The accepted method of standard Gearscore and achievement checking means nothing, or as you said it’s a way of something covering themselves in assuming you can perform in the raid. In my case a lot of times it means was that my guild carried me through it, whether it was heroics when I was a new 80 or ToC25 – I mean sure I finished it, but I had no idea what I was doing.

1) What is required of this instance/raid (as in really required, not desired.. ICC in GS2,000 gear will be a stretch unless you are intentionally being carried and the rest of the raid are happy for you to enjoy the fight face down).

2) Does your gear score meet, or exceed this number (ie. you can’t come with 2,000… 4,500 is fine, 6,000 is overkill, but sure come along)

3) Achievements are a hard one. I have seen people advertising for x10 achievements ofr x25 raids – makes some sense, but it is difficult to link your main’s achievements when you are on an alt.

Likewise you may be as, if not more familiar than many people in the raid via your own research.

Now if GS had a 2-way arrangement, where when you supply your GS/Achievements, the party/raids was returned to you as a summary… then you would know if you were just being abused